Category: Developing Autonomy

The dream says, “Hey there. It’s you I’m talking to.” The dream comes from your less put into a box mind. That alert part of the self is sending you a message. Some call dreams mental garbage. They want to keep a lid on consciousness which is a sign of fear. They have a Pandora’s box approach to knowing who they are.

Dreams offer valuable information. You learned to fear such internal knowing by parents who feared their own. They were silenced before you by unresolved conflicts with their own parent. Rules are rules until you examine and decide whether to follow or disregard them. It becomes a matter of your choosing.

Your unrestricted mind creates a dream which opens your eyes. It tells you what to examine. Defenses are created in childhood to give us a sense of safety. Whether they should continue operating outside our awareness in adult life is something else. Childhood defenses stick out their mental foot which trips us into childhood. A dream calls attention to what we need to know in order to grow up.

Take the following dream:

I was in a small, cheap hotel in the hinterlands of India. Went for a walk with some of the locals I had recently met. Chattering and listening to them was a lot of fun. I didn’t pay close attention to how we got to where we were ended up. My memory was of making a right turn outside the hotel, going straight ahead for a while then making a left and walking some more. It seemed to be a simple plan.

So I go for that walk alone the next day. After walking a certain distance straight ahead I turn left and walk some more. Thinking to go back, nothing looks familiar. Did I make yesterday’s right and left? I am confused and scared. I see all kinds of tantalizing sights, beautiful people, a long-haired woman selling pineapple at a stand, a man sitting cross-legged in front of his door, meditating or just looking at the world. I see small churches, religious people coming and going, a very large pond. The people are friendly. One invites me into her house where I meet family members. So much belonging, but I am not one of them.

I ask them for directions but what kind of direction can they give since I cannot remember the name of my hotel. So I walk on. See hump-necked cattle grazing. After a while, I ask another person about where to go and am told to take a dirt path downhill into the jungle. I decide not to go that way. It is too wild and devoid of people. I keep walking. The people, their temples, their spirit of acceptance is appealing. I cannot stay and cannot leave since I do not know how to go back to my hotel. Stranded.

A dream tends to speak in metaphorical images. Wandering in a wild world seemingly unprepared is a childhood approach to parental hatred. It is the defense of “unknowing.” How strange one uses ineptness to survive. It elicits parental blows for an impersonal failure rather than doing my best and being attacked for that. Deliberate inadequacy is something to hide behind. I remember that my parents were jealous of any sign of my intellect. My father had to be the best, period. My mother had to psychologically knock me down in order to own me so that I could not leave her. I could only be good at something they both did not understand so I painted as a path they could not follow.

But my writing they could and did evaluate. It was a constant put down. I began to conceal my work with traces of disorder. Being sloppy fit in with their criticism. My typing was terrible. My paper had fingerprints and other smudges. I did not know that sloppiness was my choice. I lost my work on the subway. “How can you be so stupid” was their refrain. I was lost and stranded by my defense.

This defense came with me to college. Teachers who gotten past their own inner punishing parent said my work was very good. One who really encouraged me said that my work which was wonderfully unique seemed to have been fished out of a toilet bowl. He had not been taken by my disorder and suggested I keep writing.

So here I am an adult desiring to use creativity, probably writing to help our increasingly upset world. My dream of being lost in a foreign jungle due to forgetting where I came from reminds me of my own parent-compressed mind and tells me to that I can choose to be unprepared or not.

When you awaken, do not leap out of bed since movement eliminates memory. Note what you dreamed and see your associations. These will tell you what you need to know. They will help you plan where you want to go and how to get there.

Political statements which support depriving middle and lower classes while holding onto wealth and power are repeated by the writing of corporate funded news. These stir up hatred by stating that one group steals the ever fewer jobs from the other. Those with their hands in the till (of our tax money and their investments) tell us that we are endangered by ….. Muslims, blacks, Jews, women, Indians trying to protect our water, …. anyone who wants to protect those with power from being accused and punished for their life destructive incursions.

The 1 percent goes up and the 99 percent goes down, down, down. Let us look at Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who has zero experience, understanding and interest in public schools. She said that public education “is a poor investment.” Part of her family’s great wealth comes from collecting student loans. She stated that she wants to offer vouchers to poor people so that their children can go to the assumed superior charter schools. This stated intention is a scam. After receiving the voucher, poor people still cannot afford to send their child to a charter school so the child does not attend. Children in charter schools are there from the start because their parents have money to pay. Voucher money is taken from the public school kitty for the sole goal of impoverishing it. Look where the money goes when assigning responsibility.

The Trump group is talking about closing the Department of Education (i.e. public schools) in 2018. Education when effective, creates a thinking person. DeVos has stated her intention is to have the schools endorse religious principles. She called it God’s Kingdom, presumably a Christian enclave. Remember the separation of church and state? Now forget it. Such restricted schooling gets students to submit to the propaganda of millionaires and billionaires who enhance their wealth by getting rid of public services; to end Medicare and Medicaid; to privatize the Social Security they call an “entitlement, a misnomer which is a euphemism for a lie. Social Security is a lifetime investment taken from your “pay check”; Teachers increasingly “teach to the exam” which means suppressing thought. The controlling 1 percent has got its claws in creative teaching. Passing a test does not mean you can think.

We are inundated with the false understanding about what threaten us instead of how we are actually being robbed. Panicked by an imagined history, we ignore the threat of EOs (Executive Orders) one after the other. Recently an EO proposed to end the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) which reveals money-making environmental damage, the EO canceling the CPB (Committee for Public Broadcasting) which supports air time for small and public supported voices. Day after day, on and on and on. All the basic stuff of life is being turned into money. They are pulling up the sidewalks.

I was quite depressed and fearful last night, even of the consequences of my being noticed for writing this. Then I had this dream.

I saw a group of children, perhaps about 50 of them standing together and not of the “same” racial group. One of them did or was said to have said something negative against another. It was stated by the teacher as if being a criminal act. The teacher asked, “…who did it” to the crowd. Asked them to expose that child so that the others would get angry and attack. “Speak up. Talk. What is your reaction to this behavior?” But no one spoke. She tried to up the ante by characterizing the unknown child as “a bad one.” But still, there was no speech. The teacher could not stir up fear and hatred. She was defeated, silenced.

At the end of my dream, there was happiness in the children’s eyes. Also in my own eyes as I awakened. I felt the spirit of love shared by all the children. Love sustains life.

Your narcissist does not feel empathy. If anything helps you decide whether your parent is a narcissist, this is guidepost number one. Although many of our cultural values are narcissistic: “look at me… at my car… my possessions… where I vacation, etc., these are superficial attention getters. The heart of the show-off may still beat in tune with yours.

The narcissist suffers from a far more serious mental absence. Their attention is encased in a psychological hall of mirrors, wrapped up in “it’s all about me.” As a result, the narcissistic parent cannot know you, their child (or friend or lover). One has to feel the “other” person to know them. The narcissist may speak words of caring if they have caught onto saying these as a required social image but their heart is not in it.

You, their child feel that emptiness until you start pulling the wool over your own eyes. The child of a narcissist usually falls in line with their parent illusory need to be seen as loving. The child does this in hope of one day receiving the parent’s real love. The child imagines the parent is capable of feeling love but is withholding it because, you, their child are faulty. The child cannot stand the grief of knowing they have a forever love-deficient parent. Instead, they take the blame. The notion of courting a love-withholding person guides their love-life ever after.

The narcissistic parent may utter words of sympathy when their child has suffered some kind of injury, for which they congratulate themselves on acting caring but words said do not mean that they feel your pain. Every word uttered reflects on their need for glory. In like manner, they attack their child for failing to be perfect at something because it casts a negative light on them or, even after they scold the child, are secretly exulted since their child’s failure puts them on a higher plane. I am above you because I lack that fault. Whether praising or attacking, all felt and done is self-referential. You do not exist for them in your own right.

Narcissistic parents are fakes who make their child into a fake. They put a false image onto themselves with which the child must fit. The child initially knows that it is only a “pretense” like pretending to be a ghost at Halloween, but over time, the child loses awareness of it as an act, forgets how to find/be/know their own true self. A feeling of emptiness follows. A child needs its parent’s accurate (and loving reflection) to develop a sense of self.

Your narcissistic parent revels in vanity as do all children in their early years. All children need to be seen as great at least during the terrible two’s until reality cuts it down to an acceptable self-image. The narcissist never leaves this stage of self-adulation. It is his shelter and defense against knowing himself to be a hollow man or woman.

The narcissist’s feelings are easily wounded. You, their child are expected to applaud, to build them up and support them. Once grown, the only way out of this un-loved affair is to leave it. You will be met with a barrage of objections, called selfish and self-centered after all “I have done for you.’ You need to take a gigantic step of not accepting the parent’s accusation that you are abandoning them since in the narcissistic parent’s unconscious mind, they remain your child.

The “sponge self” you developed under their barrage of projection and need has to be recognized and discarded. A sponge cannot say here I am and here I am not, regardless of what you say about me. The sponge self automatically agrees with the narcissist’s idealization or denigration. The narcissistic parent will never stop asking you for more. Do not fight with them to see you as you are since they can’t do it. Fighting is a form of attachment. It is a demand the parent set you free rather than you freeing yourself. Gracefully as possible move into the wonderful confusion of owning your own life.

I Wanted to Study how I learned to love those who could not love. It was writing Unloved Again that taught me the origin is childhood pain denied.

You who love those who cannot love you or reject those who can, do not know why you do it. It is like you are in a state of amnesia. You do not know how you got here. Things simply happen to you. If you are unable to see that it is you who make the choices, in effect the same mistakes, ask the opinion of people who are objective. Repetition is a tell-tale sign of choice.

It is like you are perched on the roof of a dark and shuttered house. You do not know how you got there nor how to enter. You periodically receive messages from that house along with feelings. These messages tell you who to love and hate including to hate yourself. You think these messages come from the “real you.”

Why do you assume that this inner voice represents your adult self? It is like believing advice from someone who profits if you make the “right choice.” Accepting the terrified thinking of your inner child and the terrifying directives of your inner parent denies that you can grow. You are to remain fixed in childhood. You may fool yourself into accepting these opinions by calling them your “intuition.” There are so many ways we fool ourselves.

The internal structure of the darkened house is very fragile. Its parts connect one to the other like cripples leaning against one another for greater balance. If one of them steps out of the pack, all the rest fall down. The source of this mad circumstance of lasting disorder is that it represents half fighting and half surrender. It is the power of surrender which brings the parts down together – I fall into you. It is the power of resistance which binds the two together – You can’t get up without me. This building is covered by a dark roof which protects its contents from the wind and rain of recognition. You are to hear what it tells you and feel what it sends you but not understand the source.

How the child survived with unloving, brutal and rejecting parents is what the house is about. Many of these aspects have to do with denying the reality of what happened. The child turns his abuse into something better or takes the blame for it. If it all was his fault, punishment was called for. Does he need more? The parent was a bully whose nails of hatred were hammered into the child’s wood of self-identity. How does the adult handle this? How does it color his view of love?

The adult perched on the roof hears the child’s distant cry and takes it as his own. He has not separated from his internal child. Some neurotically-driven people dedicate their lives to saving the inner child. But you cannot rewrite the past. You can only understand it in order to leave the past behind. Those dedicated to saving their remembered inner child, sacrifice their present life. There are many forms of arrested development and this is one.

To accept the feelings and directives from that darkened house is to declare yourself invalid. You need to break into that mental building and examine its every piece. Study the child’s willingness to surrender. See the rationalizations and lies that make this possible. Study your parent’s emotional weakness which underlies their terrifying behavior. Remember them as hungry ghosts, throat too small to swallow and fill their endless need (Dante’s Inferno) Get a calendar in your mind so that you can distinguish past from present.

You will be energized to follow this difficult path by pain. See that your pain was inflicted by a cruel parent who needed to injure their child. Reject accepting pain as the path to love. Do not identify punishment as love. Pain is pain and nothing else. Pain is a terrible connection. Sever yourself from that kind of union. Pain is there to alert you to do something about its source not to surrender, not to quiet you down. Growing numb does not free you. Feeling my pain and understanding where it comes from and especially not accepting a guilty position helped me stop choosing people who could not love me You can do it too.

Unloved Again shows people struggling to understand their history. The internal child will always cry in terror. Is that terror relevant to your “now?” The internal parent will always threaten the child. Should you, the adult be afraid? An adult mind declares these experiences to be from the past. It is time for achieving great emptiness in order for something new to enter. Loving someone who can love you now is living in the present.

Get my book Unloved Again today! Email me directly at elangolomg@gmail.com in order to get your signed copy. Hardcover ($25 including shipping) and Paperback ($16 Squareup.com/store/elangolomb.)

Make a joke of it. Laugh yourself right out of being mired in your culture’s negative perspective, your neighbor’s mindless receptivity , your newspaper’s acceptance of the inevitability of something totally bad happening as if we have no relationship to the cause. We need to reject, to fight against submitting to the destruction of all things. We have an important device to do it. It is humor. We can laugh at newspapers which try to shade the truth to the benefit of the owning corporation. We can laugh at the advice (not necessarily to their face) given by frightened and biased Mom and Dad, laugh at the whole damn world telling you to join them in an unstated suicide pact when you need to opt out.

The insight about the role of humor came to me last night. I was feeling very sad and helpless upon learning about the disappearance of Julian Assange of Wikileaks from the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain. I feared that he had been captured and possibly killed, possibly tortured to get him to reveal and submit. The subsequent news silence about where he is either damns or supports hope for his survival.

Then I read about the mistaken spraying with a bee-killing spray of bees in 2 US states. The staff wasn’t supposed to spray infected trees by day when bees are out gathering pollen. But whoever was in charge of spray timing did not know, did not remember or did not bother to tell the workers so they merrily sprayed by day and spread enormous death. How can we as a group be so stupid, killing those animals on which our food source depends?

Is it due to jobs being made automatic, transformed into parts done by strangers who are not plants lovers, farmers, workers who do not know, see, feel the consequences of what they do? We cannot do it right by Mother Earth after disconnecting from her. We have to be/feel part of the family of life in order to sustain our “right action.”

US companies are using neonicotinoids, an insect-killing poison known to kill bees. Neonicotinoids are currently forbidden in Europe where natural survival is honored. But not in the US where the congressional members get money to run for office from neonicotinoid selling corporations and in turn have to do their bidding. Congress is not part of the family of life. It is now a business connected to the living world in terms of power and money.

So they/we are killing bees which spread pollen that fertilizes plants which keeps the plant world growing. Does our education deliberately miss understanding pollen as an essential part of our existence? Or is this oversight due to ignorance? The bee world is dying due to our propensity for using killer chemicals against whenever we fear “out there.” We treat nature as our enemy rather than as our Mother. We believe ads which tell us to that the chemical is not dangerous. We make choices without knowing. We revert to childhood with frightening parents we had to obey or else. We keep ourselves from seeing the result.

When I originally studied psychology, Freud was said to have theorized 2 basic forces in man, a life and a death instinct. The life instinct leads to sex and procreation, to being social and enjoying life. The death instinct leads to harming/killing others as well as to harming self over and over and over again. We call this the “repetition compulsion.” It is a choice of death. But why would we choose death over life? Why would we choose to be enemies to ourselves? All matter is vibrating. We vibrate. Do we need to re-emerge into the whole and abandon the self as a seemingly separate part? Does energy need to leave its temporary fleshly abode? The why of it, so basic to life should be studied.

I was reading a bit of Krishnamurti, who said that the only thing that will keep us alive is love. It is a matter of what moves us, either love or hate; love or death. Our current leaders are in the pockets of the war machine. They make money by selling war toys and by using them. Every invented object, like small nuclear bombs created to “protect us” will be used. Children play with their toys.

Armaments make money when sold to others and by us when used to steal other countries natural resources. Corporations have a single objective which is to make money. They go for making more of it even if the consequence is death. They do not weigh consequences. They are a programmed machine for which humans are treated as pawns on the chessboard of life. Unintended death is “collateral damage.” There is no feeling, no flesh and blood reality to a machine.

I was asking myself how to emerge from my emotional paralysis. I had an inspiration, not for the first time. We often discover the same thing over and over, pushed out of our consciousness by our need to fit in. I thought we need to laugh at what plagues us. We need to laugh at our collective and individual life-destroying behavior. Humor creates a needed separation from our frightening objective. Humor is the basis for our saying, “no.”

When you feel down, defeated and isolated, find a humorous way to depict your plight and then share it. Another person laughing with you empowers your separation. It is humor that says “No problem.” It is humor says “keep your madness. I’ll have none of that. ” It is humor that says “…calling me names is a baby act that proves nothing.” Humor leads us to new ways to look at and handle problems. Humor sets us free.

Now we are peering at an edge over which we must fall . We need to move totally away from it, not just to give the appearance of making constructive change without doing something that can be undone in a flash. We need to not be taken in by advertising. Pseudo change come from corporations whose paid-off politicians mouth imaginary benefits including jobs, jobs, jobs! this repeated by corporation-owned newspapers and teachers who are ill-informed by all of the above as well as fitting in so as to not lose their jobs. Fear is not a good attitude to have when learning about what is.

Biased news sources threaten us with death or some kind of horrible existence if we move away from the corporate plan. Fear is used to close the minds of those who are needed to submit. Where is that part of us which wants to be self-sufficient? The child happily dwells in a world devoid of oil and fracked gas and overly hot seasons, a world free of flood and drought, of drug-inoculated animals whose drug-resistant bacteria enter our bodies once the carcass is eaten to cause disease in us. These surviving bacteria cannot be eliminated by antibiotics. The world of treating infections with antibiotics will soon be over. We are creating our world as a place where antibiotics will not work. The child is not enlivened by the so-called civilized institutions which destroy life.

A self-sufficient life is frowned upon by those who would make us dependent on products they can sell. The banks are against farmer’s independence They underprice vegetables to force farmer’s into unpayable loans until they cannot pay the mortgage and give up the farm. They chemically spray and poison underpaid factory farmers. They cause factory farmers to work at a pay-level which turns them into slaves. They poison all the vegetables and fruit and legumes and milk and meat with insecticide and growth hormone the general public will eat. We live in a poisoned world. Is this our choice?

The American Indians were removed by the European invaders because they were spiritual beings who functioned as a group. They did not think anyone owned the land in which they dwelled. This accounts for the newly arrived starving and impoverished white men’s misunderstanding when NY Indians accepted their offering of beads as a gift and not as the sales price for New York. it didn’t take long for the white men to discover that violence worked better than petty gifts or even phony treaties.

We are made to be dependent on outside forces but don’t want to see it that way, a false supposition which keeps us passive. We claim ownership of that on which we lean for support. The more unnecessary imposed support we seek, the more we become addicted to crutches that take away our lives. What will we do if there is another power failure? No refrigerator to maintain our food which spoils in days and no food to be delivered. The farmer’s trucks lack power from gas pumps that do not suck oil. No water in your tap to wash your hands or to flush your toilet. What will we do when the absence of power ends the flow of cooling water over the water pools filled with “discarded” nuclear rods at New York’s Indian Point or any other nuclear reactor?’ “Hello Fukushima.

After the explosion of the Trinity atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer said, “Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” We dwell in the sin of Adam who ate the forbidden apple so that God threw them out of the garden. What is that apple? Is it the apple of ownership? There is hope if we renounce a take-it-all and spoil-it-all society and live in a loving relationship with Mother Earth.

You may say we can’t go back. Got to have cars and TV and I-phones and pollution and spoilage until death. But the idea of permanence is false. There is no back and no forward. Everything is moving and changing. It is a flaw to worship the components of our current life as the only place to be. Survival has to do with moving into what supports life.

There is power in wind and sun and geothermal and tides and… There are extremely small and extremely large things to be discovered. The more we know, the more we see how little we know. There is seeing and feeling the beauty of the wild. Do not believe those who would make you afraid of change. Their motivation is short-sighted and usually selfish. We can share work on a farm or commune, can share our gifts and talents and not fall into the exploitative need for money. We can choose a place with a good water table far from leaking and exploding nuclear reactors. We share our work and talent, have more time for fun. We can bring out our instruments, drums, and whistles to play a tune. We dance and sing, write music and tell stories. We can lead a life that does not threaten. We can love.

Thinking about the short-sighted ideas which move us to do things for the shadiest of reasons, especially for quick profit. Usually, the ones who set the plan in action are those who already are well-off and hope for much more. Those who carry out their orders are terrified of losing their jobs and don’t think of much else. Everyone is wearing blinders.

Corporations wanting to have cheap disposal drop poisonous waste into rivers. factory farm workers fed grow-fast hormones and antibiotics not to beef and pork and chickens and turkeys so that they die fattened enough to get a good price when slaughtered. We consume the animal’s flesh with all its poisonous additives. Where did you think they went? We are poisoned too. We find the supposedly inexplicable explosion of ADD, ADHD, autism, allergies, chronic fatigue in our children and increasingly in adults. It is not a matter of better diagnostics finding something that was always there. Farm engineering so far from the natural way of life is making Mother Earth, her animals, plants, and people sick.

Then we get to the destructiveness of fighting. War is a business. It makes money for those who sell the weapons. We destroy people and earth with nuclear explosions and unmanned drones. We spray the “enemy’s” soil with Agent Orange, so that nothing can grow there, and on and on. We make the land unlivable. Nazi German’s Goering said that fear will always make the people come to heel. Those who run the war machine make the people afraid of the enemy. Next thing they are in arms. For those who profit from it, their hands are full but their hearts are empty.

Will Mother Earth recover during our lifetime or even in that of our offspring? What can I do to make a difference? I am afraid of stirring up a negative reaction in those who fear they will lose what they have. True, earth conscious behavior will remove some of these “things” and give us many others. This includes birds singing in the trees and windmills turning on our lights.

I met Pete Seeger, the great American folksinger at Buck’s Rock Work Camp when I was about 12. We were invited to sing along with him. Everyone bellowed the words to: “If I had a hammer, to “Where have all the Flowers Gone,” to “Turn, Turn, Turn,” an Amish poem Pete set to music. We came in on the chorus to “This land is your land,” Pete tapped his foot and sang while he strummed his banjo. He told stories that made us laugh and cry. It went on for hours. We all wanted more.

Pete had a great love for life. His relatives way back came on the Mayflower. He understood their flight to freedom when stood up to the McCarthy House of Un-American Activities Committee that was tracking down Communist sympathizers. They demanded Pete name his “Commie friends.” He responded, “Have You No Sense of Decency?”

He lived with his wife Toshi, in a log cabin he built himself. There were many visitors, song- writers, musicians, environmentalists, people. There was as a lot of singing and strumming of all kinds of instruments new and old. He got a group together to demand that the Hudson River polluting corporations clean up their waste. They did. I heard that Toshi would run to the phone to answer before Pete because he would invariably answer, “yes” to any request to appear for a good cause. There was no keeping him from joining worthy struggles.

I met him years later standing at a street corner of New York City, banjo over his shoulder waiting for the light to change. I went up to Pete my beloved teacher and said, “with all that is going on, I feel that nothing I can do will help. He smiled at me and said as he strode into the crosswalk, “No time for that.”

Pete traveled and sang to inspire children and adults to take care of one another as well as Mother Earth. He was a good man who lives on in our hearts and minds.